Dune, Succession and more helped HBO Max top 73 million subscribers
By Dan Selcke
The streaming wars are a bloody business, with competitors like Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max all trying to get one up on each other. With 221.84 million subscribers, Netflix is in no danger of losing its lead anytime soon, even if it fell slightly short of its recent goal of 222.06 million. Behind it is Disney+
In comparison, HBO Max has some catching up to do. Then again, that service did roll out more recently than Disney+, and it has been growing fast. According to a new earnings report, the service reached 73.8 million subscribers by the end of 2021, 46.8 million of which are located in the United States.
HBO Max grew aggressively in ‘21, both in the U.S. and in the 45 additional markets where we launched. We are up 35% over the past 24 months and are almost a full 4 yrs ahead of the original HBO Max + HBO sub projections shared with investors prior to the launch of HBO Max. 6/x pic.twitter.com/ZgmT190PKI
— Jason Kilar (@jasonkilar) January 26, 2022
Jason Kilar, the CEO of Time Warner, noted that HBO Max’s subscriber numbers are up 35 percent over the past two years, ahead of analysts’ projections by a whole four years. Speaking to CNBC, he said that the service “grew much faster than Netflix” during the last last…which might be technically true, but again, given how far ahead Netflix is in raw numbers, it’s hard to imagine them being too broken up about it.
Peacemaker has strong demand on HBO Max
Also, there’s the caveat that in 2021 WarnerMedia was releasing a lot of big movies both in theaters and on HBO Max at the same time, including Dune, Mortal Kombat and The Matrix Resurrections. That’s not happening this year, so it’ll be interesting to see if people keep subscribing.
Of course, HBO Max has exclusive TV content to offer, as well. The third season of Succession made a lot of waves when it aired last year, and the new anti-superhero show Peacemaker is in high demand according to Parrot Analytics.
Now that HBO Max has a healthy number of subscribers, its challenge will be to give them enough good original content to keep them while also attracting new adopters. I suspect the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon might help with that…
Next. Every sci-fi and fantasy show you should watch in 2022. dark
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